1800Flowers has been interactive for a long time. Longer than most companies. And they know how to capitalize  on what women want. Cross media means your  concept or story is moveable from one media platform to the next. Like a commercial that airs on tv and on the radio for example. Cross platform means content sustains an intelligibility from one platform to the next. It’s actually designed for that. Trans media, the newest of the three in entertainment and advertising, is  a subset of cross platform in that a message is dispersed across multiple media platforms to compliment one another. A trans media producer designs the instruments showcasing each part of a product story. A good example (and probably most lucrative) of that might be the Star Wars franchise. The content is set in a continuous universe but each articulation adds a component to the story. Coke (“Happiness Factory“) recently took advantage of this trans media concept.

So why does any of this matter? It’s all about how to build a business of course. At 1800Flowers, a partnership with Millionaire Matchmaker helped guys figure out what kind of flowers to by his sweetheart for Valentine’s Day with  an extended help desk for guys on what to say and how to say it with Flowers. There’s even a Facebook quiz.

The concept of brand or line extensions is not new. Consumer product marketers have been working these into the hands of housewives since my grandmother raised her two kids. So why is it taking on a shiny new veneer now? Well, we have so many more ways to get the messages out there now that what was once just a “new and improved” label on an old jar or can is now a whole other story line in another medium.

To take advantage of the extended play your product or service can get, there are lots of agencies and individuals for hire who specialize in the whys and wherefores of new generation message distribution. The one thing to bear in mind is that whatever seems out of the question today, will pretty surely be run of the mill tomorrow.